What was the biggest reason that the south lost the civil war?

Question

What was the one thing that made the South lose the civil war? How did this one thing affect the losing of the war?

Answer 1

Numbers.

The first number was manpower. Civil war battles were horrendously costly in terms of lives lost. In the worst battles, tens of thousands of soldiers would be killed on each side. But, they were deaths that the North could replace throughout the war, and the South increasingly, as the war went on, could not.

The second number was material. The lack of a manufacturing base in the South (which was mainly an agriculture-based economy), meant the South could not produce rifles, cannons, and ammunition even approaching the numbers that the North could produce.

After a few years it basically became a numbers game (which was how Grant finally beat Lee - by overwhelming him with massive amounts of men and material), and the South just could not keep up with the North.
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Answer 2

Some historians argue that the doctrine of states' rights caused the South to lose the Civil War. Individual Southern states could (and did) refuse to support the Confederate government with needed troops and supplies.

Slavery also weakened the South. The need to keep an enslaved population under control on the home front diverted some resources from the battlefield.

Answer 3

Poor leadership, both political and military. The Confederates never did understand the importance of the Western Theater, which is where the war was won. Lee, in particular, refused to send troops from the Army of Northern Virginia to fight in the West against Grant, because he wanted to invade the North and remove the war from Virginia, both invasions becoming disasters that cost him thousands of irreplaceable troops and no strategic gain whatsoever. Jefferson Davis was a moron, on top of that. Meanwhile, the Union forces were led by Grant, Sherman, Thomas, and Sheridan - men who were simply better generals than what the South was fielding against them from 1863 onwards. Industrial weakness. The South had fewer men (and many of them were Unionists, perhaps as much as a fifth), the need to retain large forces at home to guard against slave rebellions, fewer factories, a blockade to impair trade, and financial weakness (with so much wealth tied up in slaves, which were often used as collateral for the debt that financed the livelihoods of plantation owners, and little industry or shipping, the South couldn't pay for the war).

Answer 4

Attrition is the best answer, but isn't the only reason the South lost. Attrition is true because ulitmately Lee couldn't replace the soldiers he lost like Grant could. But the North also had the factories, a navy (which eventually blockaded the South from outside provisions), and the South didn't have much for factories, and their primary crop was cotton, which wasn't much use as the war went on and no one to trade with.

Answer 5

They had no manufacturing and a limited supply of man power. Also, they did not have a unified railroad system. All the track sizes down south were different sizes, in the North it was all the same.

Answer 6

Attrition, the North had too many men and too much equipment. The North could replace lost men and equipment, the South ran out of resources.

Answer 7

Shear numbers and transportation issues, could not re-supply the troops in the north. The south was agriculture based and the noth had most of the industrial strenghth.

Answer 8

Have you done some reading on the war? Put your search engine to work (instead of relying on others to spoon feed you answers). You'll find various points of view but if you think about the South (at that time) being primarily agricultural, you should be able to get some ideas on your own about why they weren't in as good a position as a more 'industrial' country/area to fight a war...

Answer 9

Not the least of the reasons is that the Confederate Army bled itself to death by its tactic of constant attack, part of its strategy of attrition to break the will of the Union to sustain the war.
One Southern historian called this "Attack and Die" war.

Answer 10

the north had more manufacturing available and added blacks also to the army when the south lost their general stonewall jackson who was a military genious it was the begining of the end ive watched several pbs reveiws of this blood and isasterous war its a shame this had to happen
mj